They all stand on the verandah, looking down at the lake.
“You can smell the fruit growing,” Alex says, inhaling.
“Do you want to go inside?” Sidonie asks, though she hopes that nobody will. But they all do want to, so she produces the key and opens the front door.
A rush of stale but cool air; already the land outside has absorbed the morning sun and warmed the air, but the house is shaded by the stand of spruce, now massive, at its southwest end. She had always known that she wouldn’t live here, that she would be the one to leave. The uselessness of nostalgia: shut the door on it.
Hugh and Cynthia stand at the dining room window, looking out, but the others move from room to room, and climb the stairs to the second storey. What do they want to see it for? They all look inward, speculative, as if trying to see this as a home. Debbie is studying the big tile stove and mantle. Justin and Tasha are, like children, trying out the old switches. (They don’t work, of course; the electricity has been off for years.) Steve taps on walls, sniffs.
Sidonie, mounting the stairs, glimpses, through the open doorway of her parents’ old bedroom, Alex and Ingrid simply standing by the window, embracing.
Alice and Sidonie’s room. It had always seemed luminous to Sidonie. But now, with the spruce grown up outside the window, the room is less bright; instead, aqueous, glimmering blue-green.
Justin and Tasha have come in to investigate Alice’s old room, and Sidonie moves back out into the hallway. Steve comes up the stairs — she hears him also pause for an instant and then resume his tread, as he passes her parents’ bedroom — and coming down the hall, says, “By the shape of the ceiling downstairs, there was a leak in the bathroom. Can I take a look?”
Sidonie moves aside to let him enter, and then looks in herself. The honeycombed tile, with its pattern of white and aqua, has been torn up, and the stained floorboards are exposed. Steve squats, reaches out, taps the wood.
“Not so bad,” he says. “No rot.”
Is he thinking that it can be saved?
Downstairs, Hugh says to Ingrid, “Well. Enjoy the tour?” and she raises an eyebrow at him, doesn’t answer. Alex and Debbie have gone into the old garden. Alex is poking at the soil with a ballpoint pen, crouched, intent, very like Stephen had been upstairs. Then he puts his hands into the soil, scoops up a double handful, lets it fall. Surprisingly, touches his loamy finger to his tongue, tastes it. All around him the pigweed, knapweed, thistles sending up their determined little shoots among the dry stalks of last year’s weeds.
A mess. Mother would be heartbroken. But no: a foolish thought. Mother is dead. She has no thought for this.
Alex, sitting in the garden, running the dry soil through his hands. “This is good soil,” he says. “It’s been built up.”
Forty years of digging in compost.
Steve says, “What happened to all of the flowers? I remember flower beds, perennials, around the house,” and kicks through the dried weeds to reveal the stalks of peonies, upthrust clogged corms of iris, the rampant unkempt tentacles of the roses.
“All still here,” Sidonie says, in wonder.
Then Debbie comes over with a cry of triumph: in her fist a dozen red raspberries. There is a clamour as they all gather to take one. They are a little small: not enough water. But the sun in them fizzes on the tongue.
Where needs must, needs will, Sidonie’s mother had been fond of saying. Now Sidonie thinks this, surveying the drawings Kevin has unrolled on her dining room table. The others are coming later for dinner, but Kevin had something to show Sidonie first. He leans over the table, beefy, shaven, tattooed; she notices his straight, thin mouth and eyebrows for the first time as familiar. He has gone to some trouble, using full-sized drafting paper, proper scale, a neat draughtsman’s printing. She’s seen enough of Adam’s work to read the plans. It’s Beauvoir, with an addition to the northeast angling off the kitchen: a large open room, glassed on two sides, with a fireplace at one end, tables, washrooms. A wide verandah. And here, plans for a refit of the kitchen: two long work areas extend the entire span, with oversized rectangles for ovens and refrigerators. Or rather, it’s not Beauvoir, but a new version of it. The old house re-envisioned as a house and restaurant.
Kevin turns over another sheet, and there’s the whole upper part of Beauvoir, the bench with additional buildings labeled “greenhouses,” “storage,” “market.” Garden areas are marked off. The symbols architects use for deciduous trees indicate a small orchard, and other symbols denote a perimeter of conifers.
And a third sheet, with an addition to the southwest end of the house: an upper storey with bedrooms and bathrooms, a lower storey labeled “spa.”
“Did you do all this?” Sidonie asks. “It looks professional.”
“My ideas. And Steve’s and Alex’s. Cynthia drew it up.”
Of course: Cynthia at Adam’s side in front of the slanted board, all those evenings.
“So, what are we looking at here?” she asks, but she already knows. It’s as if these drawings have existed in her own brain for months now, or years, dormant, hidden, and have just been brought to light.
On the telephone, Clara says disapprovingly, “You know that this is patriarchy, don’t you? Primogeniture. Alex getting the lot.”
“There’s really not enough to divide up,” Sidonie says. “The curse of farming.”
“Ha!” Clara says. Then: “Did you know that Adam left Cynthia money when he died?”
She had not known.
“It wasn’t official,” Clara says. “There wasn’t time. It was a verbal request to Anita and me, which I’m ashamed we have not yet followed through with. But there is a fund. Should we give it to her now, or wait until the boy is old enough to have some sensible ideas?”
Dinner, Sunday night, at Stephen’s. Surprisingly, the television is on; someone wants to catch a story on the news. The babble of it forms a distracting counterpoint to the conversations at the table, and Sidonie, whose chair is nearly facing the TV, who can see it through the doorway between dining room and living room, is distracted, irritated. When the news comes on, it catches her attention, in spite of herself. There’s a segment at the end on the new bridge construction, and out of the tail of her eye, just as the presenter is saying something about the dedication of the original bridge nearly fifty years ago, she catches sight of Alice.
Everyone stops chewing and talking, and she realizes that she has gasped Alice’s name aloud, and is pointing at the screen with her fork, as if it were a remote control. Stop! Stop! But the program has moved on; they’re now showing what looks like giant concrete pontoons.
“Alice!” she has said.
“Where?” Cynthia and Stephen exclaim in unison, their heads swiveling, their voices unguarded.
“Where? Why was she there?”
Sidonie has to think. There had been a crowd of people in outof-date clothes, some long-vanished public faces, a shot of the old bridge with its moveable span. “It must be old film footage. Alice was at the opening of the first bridge; yes. She was part of a group of people who greeted Princess Margaret — yes, that’s it.”
“Why Grandma Alice?” Tasha asks.
Sidonie says, “She was Lady of the Lake the year before. They wanted someone presentable to introduce to the princess.”
“What is Lady of the Lake?” Justin asks, and Alex says, “Local beauty pageant. Like being Miss Okanagan,” and Tasha says “Yuck!” but Justin says, “Grandma Alice was a beauty queen? Awesome!”
Yes, Alice the beauty queen.
There is discussion: can a copy of the tape be acquired? Who would have it? Would it be on the internet?
It has been a shock: Alice walking a little at a diagonal, her face arranging itself into a smile as she became aware of the camera. The swish of her white dress around her knees almost audible.
Somewhere, this — and perhaps more — exists on black-and-white photographic film. It can be copied — perhaps digitally �
� and they all can see it over and over.
SAGE AND PLUM
By spring 2008, the house has been mostly renovated. Steve and Alex have been working on it almost full time; still, parts have to be subcontracted to trades, and between labour and materials, there has been a hemorrhaging of cash. Both Steve’s and Sidonie’s houses have been colonized by stacks of architectural and organic farming magazines and books. The house is re-wired and plumbed and insulated. Everyone had agreed on keeping the old plastered walls, so holes have been drilled, new wiring threaded through. The electricians had grunted and sworn; it would have been much easier, they said, to have pulled off the wallboard, put up new drywall. The old copper and lead plumbing has been removed and replaced with new synthetic, and Steve has sold the copper for enough to pay for the new pipes. The insulation has been blown in from the outside between the posts and beams, the holes resealed. New windows have been bought, the old too fragile to re-glaze. Sidonie had argued for aluminum — less expensive — but Steve and Cynthia had insisted on custom windows made to look like the old. The roof tiles have been replaced where needed, the tile works in Vancouver, from which the originals had been ordered, still owned by the same Italian family.
They have all put in hundreds of hours of labour collectively: sanding, painting, varnishing, re-pointing, scrubbing, scraping and polishing.
Sidonie says, “It probably would have been cheaper and simpler to rebuild,” but Cynthia argues that the existing house is stronger, better, than what they would have arrived at.
“We have earned the house,” she says. “We have all got our fingerprints all over it.” And it is beautiful: the wood floors gleam, the granite slab in the kitchen, trimmed off and polished, reflects light from the windows during the day and the hanging linen-shaded light fixtures at night. Restaurant refrigerators and a gas range fill the old kitchen, and the dining room contains a few tables and chairs; an addition will house the rest, as they expand.
Some of what Cynthia has called serendipity has occurred with the furniture: visiting Walt in his convalescence, Sidonie is surprised by his offer of two dressers, a dining table, a suite of chairs. “They’re from the house, from your house,” Walt says. “You gave them to me when you closed it up, back in 73. Also some beds and tables, but they haven’t survived our boys. You gave us all this.”
“You can take them,” Christina says. “We’re getting new for our condo. These won’t fit.”
Steve, seeing the chairs, is excited; they have been made by a craftsman; they can be copied, he says, for the restaurant.
Kevin, Celeste, and the boys will live in the old house for now, it has been decided. It will be more convenient, with Kevin cooking, Celeste running the restaurant. A second house will be built later. Sidonie has some ideas about this: she has the beginnings of an idea of a small house, a Craftsman-style house in a copse of ponderosa. She sees, in prescient flashes, herself working at a wooden kitchen table, sees warm pine, a small deck, a door opening to a herb garden, window boxes with scarlet geraniums.
Anita visits. Sidonie drives with her out to Beauvoir, where the foundations for the restaurant addition are being poured. She waves to Steve and Alex, who, hard-hatted, are working the stony porridge down between the forms with long paddles. They wave back. She leads Anita out of the way of the trucks to the porch. She has not planned to go inside — it is not her house, now — but Kevin is in, sees her from the kitchen, opens the door for them. He is trying out a soup, he says: if they wait, he will let them test it for him.
They walk around the garden and orchard. Anita says, “It is a little like Italy. Lake Maggiore, maybe. But the light is different — more northern. It’s bluer and throws harder shadows.”
Sidonie has loaned to the restaurant the art that doesn’t work in her new house; here, against the older plaster, the lower ceilings, the oils and photographic prints come alive.
“You’ve kept the Prudence Heward,” Anita says. “That’s good — I’ve always thought it was a good likeness.”
“It isn’t me.”
“It is, though, in a way. Look. The hair, the colouring, the shape of the face. The way the model is looking at the space in front of the viewer, as if she’s paying attention to something nobody else can see.”
Along the inside of the dining room, half a dozen of Anita’s photographs are lined up in their copper frames — black and white shots of rooftops, ironwork, textured walls. Anita looks at them critically. “Some of these aren’t bad,” she says. “I remember taking them — I was trying to make a narrative of the Plateau district. But they still look too European, don’t they? I didn’t see that at the time.”
They are served Kevin’s soup, which he is refining in preparation for the menu. Anita laughs when she tastes it. “A good joke,” she says. “The story of the homely borscht, deconstructed.” Sidonie is bewildered, but Kevin leans over the table eagerly. “You picked up on that? The way the ingredients have been incarnated as references?”
“Oh, yes; the chiffoniered pickled beet and cabbage on the floating latke,” Anita says. “Very witty. And the soup is so light, like a broth.”
Kevin looks very happy. “And did you catch the apple?”
“Apple cider for the pickling, correct? And a little apple butter on the latke?”
“You should move out here!” Kevin says. “You’d be an amazing consultant. We should have you write the menu for us. Hell, we should have you write reviews. A plant.”
Anita laughs. “Maybe I will,” she says, “if Sidonie won’t move back to Montreal with me. You’ve no idea how much I miss her.”
They are flirting, Anita and Kevin. She is amazed, as always, to notice this, to understand that people are capable of simultaneous awareness of these attractions, that they have the energy and will to enact them. From the outside, it is like watching the ballet of iridescent, scintillating birds. Only they are her birds: they are beings otherwise familiar to her, otherwise known.
Would Anita move here? Live with her, perhaps? But it is difficult to imagine Anita away from her galleries, her network of artists and café owners and denizens of urban parks and streets.
They drive down the hill to the lake, and sit on Sidonie’s tartan car blanket over the small flat oval stones. The lake is glass-clear, and glimmers with the ochre and cream and charcoal of the pebble bed.
The little throb of the water at the shore. The damp rustle of new poplar leaves. The taste in the air, of limestone and green sap. The sun and sap-smell and colours run through the veins, up through the skull, down through the soles of the feet, sewing her to the earth, to the overarching sky. She breathes, is conscious both of her own breathing, of the air and water and stone around her. An unfolding, a settling.
Anita is looking through her camera, taking shot after shot. The camera makes an almost mechanical shutter sound; an addin, Sidonie thinks, to make the camera sound like an older one, to make its action more tangible, more connected.
Alex and Ingrid move into the Quonset hut where the ladders and machines used to be housed, for the summer; Alex is looking for a second-hand mobile home that can be towed onto the property. They share the corrugated half-cylinder with their new tractor, their rakes and hoes and harrows, bins and crates and plastic sheeting and tubing. They have a little stove and a bar fridge running off a long extension cord from the house, a sink with cold water only, a castoff sofa and bed. The hut smells of loam and sex and occasionally of marijuana. Sidonie visits them, bringing a bottle of wine, which she and Alex share, and bottles of blackcurrant syrup and soda for Ingrid. Alex has shaved his head and beard, for the heat, and also for ease in washing, he says. Sidonie thinks that he resembles her father now, and says so. Ingrid says, “I think so too: Cynthia showed us some photos. He’ll be a good orchardist like his great-grandfather, yeah. He is studying all the time, when he isn’t working in the orchard or on the house.”
She sees that Alex has tacked up charts and graphs with spray schedules:
spraying has now become a fine science, with applications timed to emergence of insect species, to mean temperature readings, to traps. Alex shows her some of the tools: the pheromone traps, the wrap-around bands, the degree-day charts. He talks about the sprays: they have names now like Sniper, Assail, Confirm, Intrepid, Admire. “It’s very complex,” he says. “I never was one for memorizing stuff at school, but this is interesting.” He talks about toxicity, about chloro-nicotinyls and organo-phosphates. He says, “I thought we could do it all with pheromones and stick insects and chickens, but I don’t think we can. Not with our labour pool and the concentration of orchards in this area.”
Sidonie remembers her father tapping the limbs, and tells Alex about the white cloths, the insect counting. His eyes glow. “Thanks, yes! That’s just the sort of thing I need to know.”
Hugh and Sidonie take a break from being carpenters’ assistants and lie on the lawn in the shade of the spruce cluster. A group of finches hops and twitters in the spruce branches; one of the males tips back his crimson head and warbles a spiral of high, clear notes.
“Purple,” Sidonie says.
“Highly unlikely,” Hugh says. “Probably House.”
“No; that warble is Purple. And he has a little point to his head — it’s not flat. And no streaks on his belly.”
Hugh sits up. “You’re right. What are they doing here? Used to be all House here. The bird population is decimated.”
“The birds are coming back,” Sidonie says. “We had a flock of goldfinches in that bit of fallow field the other day. And Steve gets three different varieties of hummingbirds at his feeder.”
After Alice Page 30